Coremetrics, a provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing, today announced the release of the 2.0 edition of LIVEmail, the company's behavioral email marketing offering. This automated technology allows email marketers to use behavioral analytics to monitor both individual and group trends and effectively target the right audience.
The primary objective of LIVEmail 2.0, according to John Squire, senior vice president of product strategy and general manager of marketing services at Coremetrics, is to use the massive amounts of fact-level data collected from each click, made by each individual, on each page of a Web site. From that, marketers can create a message that is more timely and relevant, and therefore well received to address a critical need.
A common mistake marketers have been making, Squire says, is that "they just showcase their top products" rather than the best product for a particular customer. With LIVEmail 2.0, customers can "go deeper into catalogue [to find something] they may not have found on their own," he says. The original LIVEmail, introduced in 2003, enabled marketers to unite the data captured by Coremetrics with consumer email addresses and online behavior and send the entire package to the email service provider for targeted marketing. ("LIVE" stands for Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience.)
LIVEmail 2.0 now automates the integration of LIVE Profile (which records individual behavior) with Intelligent Offer (which records group behavior) and sends the information to an email service provider all in one click. The automatic segmentation and monitoring of customers improves marketers' ability to reach them, Squire says. Marketers can then send customers information through the appropriate email service delivering a very specific message.
Companies usually have at least two or three different email service providers for their varying needs. Squire describes how some email services are very good at fast, transactional emails (e.g., purchase-confirmation emails), while others are better structured for bulk emails (e.g., weekly or monthly newsletters); but most services, he says, lack the "underlying data to fuel their phenomenal messaging capabilities." LIVEmail 2.0 combines with email marketing to "build in the community aspect and the segment aspect, and for the systems that have these deep data warehouses, to use [the data] to bubble it up and say, 'These are the best people, and the best offers to send out to them.' "

According to Patti Freeman Evans, senior analyst at Jupiter Research, integration "is a direction that the marketplace is going, so the competitors in this space are on this path is well." She adds that this technology will allow marketers to get as far as they can with scarce resources. However, despite what she calls the potentially robust benefits of the new LIVEmail application, Coremetrics faces at least two challenges.
First, marketers are facing an era of breakneck pace and an inability to look beyond the task at hand. Because of this, they are inclined to tackle their immediate priorities rather than ones that could benefit them in the long run. Second, even after some marketers have implemented LIVEmail 2.0, they'll need to be educated in its various capabilities in order to maximize its resources--a process that will take both readjusting and time, which, again, is in precious little supply.
Squire anticipates LIVEmail 2.0 will reach the 50 percent to 60 percent of email marketers who don't have the resources in place right now to do sophisticated behavioral analysis on their own, but "want something that's automated, easy, and reliable: 'I turn it on, it makes money for me, and my customer satisfaction increases.' " Still undergoing beta testing until September, LIVEmail 2.0 is being launched in conjunction with four premier partners: Cheetahmail, eDialog, Exact Target, and Responsys. Coremetrics plans to charge companies between $2,000 and $15,000 per month, depending on the size of each company's database.
With LIVEmail 2.0, Freeman Evans says, Coremetrics may just change the playing field by narrowing it: "What they've done is allow better capabilities for targeting." That heightened precision may be what the email marketing industry needs most right now. "We have certainly seen diminishing returns [in email marketing]," she says. "However, retailers are still getting a good amount of return on investment. The more sophisticated one is in [one's] targeting capabilities--from the behavioral standpoint and product lifecycle standpoint--the more effective and efficient it can be."
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